OUR VIEW: Alabama benefits from diversity, though with a noxious immigration law, one wouldn't know it

Few Alabamians would dispute that UAB is one of the top economic engines of Alabama.

The university is internationally known for its biomedical and other research, ranging from the HIV virus and AIDS, to the biology of Antarctica. Many of UAB Hospital's treatment programs are nationally ranked.

When UAB's faculty worries that Alabama's immigration law jeopardizes "the research, teaching and clinical enterprises of departments," that should worry all Alabamians, especially the state's leaders.

The UAB faculty senate this week voted to call for repeal of Alabama's immigration law. The reason is pretty simple, said John C. Chatham, chair of the faculty senate and a professor and director of the division of molecular and cellular pathology: "UAB is known nationally and internationally for its focus on diversity. This law has the potential to tarnish that image. This will impact our ability to recruit talented faculty to UAB and Alabama."

If the state is perceived as intolerant and discriminatory, that will make it more difficult for university officials not only to recruit top researchers and medical personnel, but international students as well.

That would be a shame, considering that the Princeton Review ranked UAB No. 3 in the nation for diverse student population.

Even before UAB's faculty acted, Birmingham-Southern College's faculty adopted a statement that said the immigration law "creates a climate of fear and xenophobia that diminishes all of us."

U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson would agree, if his 108-page ruling Monday is an indication. Thompson blocked a provision of the immigration law that would have forced undocumented residents to leave their mobile homes because they couldn't renew the registrations they need to live in them.

Thompson said there was substantial evidence discrimination against Hispanics motivated the Legislature to pass the law. Thompson noted the legislative debate on the immigration law "was laced with derogatory comments about Hispanics."

Thompson said the law's "treatment of children in mixed status families, who are overwhelmingly Latino, is so markedly different from the State's historical treatment of children" that it suggests strongly the "difference in treatment was driven by animus against Latinos in general and thus the statute was discriminatorily based."

The examples of insensitive comments by lawmakers -- including by Micky Hammon, R-Decatur, a primary sponsor of the law -- make it hard to accept there was not a discriminatory motivation.

That hurts Alabama's reputation, which, in turn, hurts UAB and other universities that recruit international students and faculty.

As UAB, BSC and other universities in Alabama have shown through example and action, diversity is good and not something to discourage -- as the Alabama Legislature did when it so enthusiastically embraced this noxious immigration law.